Forgetting Our History

Happy President’s Day! On a day that honors our nation’s history, it’s fitting to take a moment to consider how we’re passing that history down to our youngest students. When we think about the skills and knowledge children need to master in PK-3, our minds tend to go first to language and literacy–with good reason, because language and literacy are gateway skills that open to door for children to master further learning, and these are critical years for language and literacy. We also tend to think about social and emotional development and, sometimes, mathematics.

But that doesn’t mean PK-3 education should neglect children’s learning in the content areas–including history. As E.D. Hirsch argues persuasively in The Knowledge Deficit literacy isn’t simply a matter of accurately decoding text–to be truly proficient readers, children need to develop an extensive vocabulary and content knowledge, in order to understand what they’re reading and place it in the framework of what they already know. That means that elementary school students need to become familiar with basic content in science, history, geography, and so on.

Unfortunately, American public education has a poor record of teaching history to early elementary school students. Historian Dianne Ravitch writes,

“The social studies curriculum for the K-3 grades is organized around the study of the relationships within the home, school, neighborhood, and local community. This curriculum of “me, my family, my school, my community” now dominates the early grades in American public education. It contains no mythology, legends, biographies, hero tales, or great events in the life of this nation or any other. It is tot sociology.”

When elementary schools do teach history to children in the early grades, it tends to be in a scattershot “heroes and holidays” approach on occasions like Thanksgiving and President’s Day–rather than a concerted effort to introduce elementary students to an aligned history curriculum that builds knowledge on knowledge throughout the early years. And some schools are downplaying history and social studies content altogether in order to focus more time on literacy and math skills.

The result–only 17 percent of American fourth-graders are proficient in history, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP–otherwise known as The Nation’s Report Card).

We can–and must–do better than this. Developing foundational literacy, math, and social and emotional skills is an essential goal of PK-3 early education, but mastery in these areas needn’t come at the expense of instruction in history, science, and other core content areas. These topics can be integrated into literacy and math instruction–for example, reading selections that build literacy skills can also emphasize history content. Aligned PK-3 curricula can also help ensure that the activities that help children develop literacy and math skills also expose children to a wide range of history and science content. In Building Blocks, Gene Maeroff profiles schools that are doing a good job integrating content knowledge into the early elementary curriculum.

Too many children–and adults–know President’s Day and Martin Luther King Day, which we celebrated a few weeks ago, as little more than a day off work, and an excuse for furniture stores and used car dealers to advertise huge sales. That’s a problem, and one for which the solution needs to start in PK-3.